The Revealed Part
Most of this week went on other people. Who needs what, and who has to move for any of it to happen. Some of it got settled. A good deal did not, and the parts still open are the ones carrying the most weight — the kind you can write down on a page and still have no idea how they finish. There are changes coming for us. That is genuinely as far as it has got.
Around all that, the ordinary work. Mitzpe does not pause while a family sorts itself out. And next week we go to Atlanta for the High Holidays, which is a second set of arrangements stacked on the first.
This Shabbat is Nitzavim-Vayeilech, the last one before Rosh Hashanah. Moshe is at the end of his life with the whole nation in front of him, running a version of the same arithmetic — what is settled, and which of the unsettled parts are actually his.
He answers it in one sentence near the end of Nitzavim, and it is one of the odder verses in the Torah.
הַנִּ֨סְתָּרֹ֔ת לַיהֹוָ֖ה אֱלֹהֵ֑ינוּ וְהַנִּגְלֹ֞ת לָ֤ׄנׄוּׄ וּׄלְׄבָׄנֵ֙ׄיׄנׄוּ֙ׄ עַׄד־עוֹלָ֔ם לַעֲשׂ֕וֹת אֶת־כׇּל־דִּבְרֵ֖י הַתּוֹרָ֥ה הַזֹּֽאת׃
Concealed acts concern the ETERNAL our God; but with overt acts, it is for us and our children ever to apply all the provisions of this Teaching.
Rashi reads this as the answer to a complaint he puts in our mouths first. The chapter has just threatened the whole community over what one person does in private, and the obvious objection is that nobody can see inside anybody. So Moshe splits it. The hidden belongs to God, and God will deal with it. The open belongs to us, and if we let it sit there, the community pays.
Then there is the strange thing on the page. In a Torah scroll the words lanu ul’vaneinu — to us and to our children — carry dots above the letters, eleven of them, running across both words and onto the first letter of the word after. It is one of a handful of places in the whole text where a scribe marks something this way. The Gemara in Sanhedrin reads the dots as a date. Even for open sins, Israel was not held answerable for one another until they had crossed the Jordan and taken the oath between Gerizim and Eival. Mutual responsibility starts somewhere. Before that, every man answered for himself.
So the verse divides labor, and it lands on a verb. La’asot. To do. Everything in front of that word is bookkeeping about who owns which column, and the word itself is the job.
Two chapters on, Moshe comes back to the same verb, and this time he argues with you about it. The mitzvah is not too hard for you, he says, and not far off. Not up in heaven, so nobody has to go up and fetch it. Not over the sea either. Rashi refuses to let that land as relief — were it in heaven, he says, you would have to go up after it anyway. You would still owe the climb. What Moshe is doing here is telling you where the thing actually sits.
כִּֽי־קָר֥וֹב אֵלֶ֛יךָ הַדָּבָ֖ר מְאֹ֑ד בְּפִ֥יךָ וּבִֽלְבָבְךָ֖ לַעֲשֹׂתֽוֹ׃
No, the thing is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to observe it.
La’asoto. To do it. The same verb a second time, now fastened to your mouth and your heart, which are the two things you brought into the room with you.
The rabbis took that line a good deal further than Moshe likely meant it. In Bava Metzia there is an argument about whether a particular oven can become impure, and Rabbi Eliezer, outvoted, calls up one miracle after another to prove he has it right — a carob tree moves, a stream runs backwards, the walls of the study hall start to lean in. Then a voice comes out of heaven and says he is right. Rabbi Yehoshua gets to his feet and quotes this verse straight back at it. Lo bashamayim hi. The Torah came out of heaven at Sinai and we have been holding it ever since, so a voice from above does not get a vote in a room where the rabbis are counting hands. Read that way the verse is a job description, which is what 29:28 said one chapter earlier, with the dots on it.
I have been circling that all week without meaning to. When a family has real decisions in front of it and none of them have landed yet, there is a hard pull toward treating the unresolved part as the work — turning it over, trying to get out ahead of an answer that is not available. It feels like the responsible thing to do. It mostly burns the week.
The unresolved part is God’s this week, in the plainest sense the verse means it. What sits in front of me is smaller and entirely doable. Who needs what. What has to be booked, paid for, packed, and asked for. Whether everybody has a bed and a seat at shul. None of it asks me to know how the year goes.
There is a kindness in the timing that I did not arrange. Rosh Hashanah begins next Friday night, and the last thing the Torah hands us on the way in is a note about what belongs to God, plus a second note reminding us that our own half sits closer than we keep insisting. In your mouth. In your heart.
We will be in Atlanta for it. The arrangements are mostly made. The big things will still be open when the shofar goes, which is the ordinary condition of a person hearing it, and always was.
Shabbat shalom.
— Uriel ben Avraham